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Arthur Protin asked me to
comment on a recent interview with linguist George Lakoff:
Paul Rosenberg: Don't think of a rampaging elephant: Linguist George
Lakoff explains how the Democrats helped elect Trump.
Lakoff has tried to promote himself as the liberal alternative
to Frank Luntz, who's built a lucrative career polling and coining
euphemisms for Republicans. I first read his 2004 primer, Don't
Think of an Elephant! Know Your Values and Frame the Debate,
which consolidated ideas from his earlier Moral Politics: How
Liberals and Conservatives Think -- a dichotomy he's still
pitching as "the strict father/nurturent parent distinction." I've
never liked this concept. I'll grant that conservatives like the
flattering "strict father" construct, not least because it conflates
family and society, in both cases celebrating hierarchical (and,
sure, patriarchal) order, and there's something to be said for
recognizing how they see themselves. But the alternative family
model isn't something I'd like to see scaled up to society, where
nurturing morphs into something patronizing, condescending, and
meddlesome, and worse still that it grants the fundamentally wrong
notion that what's good for families is equally good and proper
for society and government. This is just one of many cases where
Lakoff accepts the framing given by Republicans and tries to game
it, rather than doing what he advises: changing the framing. I
don't doubt that his understanding of cognitive psychology yields
some useful insights into how Democrats might better express their
case -- especially the notion that you lead with your values, not
with mind-numbing wonkery. But it's not just that Democrats don't
know how best to talk. A far bigger problem is that Democrats lack
consensus on values, except inasmuch as they've been dictated by
the need to collect and coalesce all of the minorities that the
Republicans deplore.

You see, back in Nixon days, with Kevin Phillips and Pat Buchanan
doing the nerd-work, Republicans started strategizing how to build
a post/anti-New Deal majority. They started with the GOP's core base
(meaning business), whipped up a counterculture backlash (long on
patriotism and patriarchy), and lured in white southerners (with
various codings of racism) and Catholics (hence their about face on
abortion), played up the military and guns everywhere. The idea was
to move Nixon's "silent majority" to their side by driving a wedge
between them and everyone else, who had no options other than to
become Democrats. The Democrats played along, collecting the votes
Republicans drove their way while offering little in return. Rather,
with unions losing power and businesses gaining, politicians like
the Clintons figured out how to triangulate between their base and
various moneyed interests (especially finance and high-tech).

Lakoff is right that Clinton's campaign often played into Trump's
hands. While some examples are new, that's been happening at least
since Bill Clinton ran first for president in 1992. Clinton adopted
so many Republican talking points -- on crime and welfare, on fiscal
balance, on deregulating banks and job-killing trade deals -- that
the Republicans had nowhere to go but even further right. For more
on Clinton and his legacy, see Thomas Frank's Listen, Liberal!
Or, What Ever Happened to the Party of the People? The key point
is that Clinton almost never challenged the values Republicans tried
to put forth. Rather, he offered a more efficient (and slightly less
inhumane) implementation of them. Indeed, his administration oversaw
the largest spurt of growth in the wealth of the already rich. If
the rich still favored Republicans, that was only because the latter
promised them even more -- maybe not wealth, but more importantly
power. That Clinton left the rich unsatisfied was only part of the
problem his legacy would face. He also left his voters disillusioned,
and his post-presidency buckraking left him looking even more cynical
and corrupt, in ways that could never be spun or reframed.

So Hillary Clinton's own political career started with two big
problems. One was that she was viewed as a person whose credentials
were built on nepotism -- not on her own considerable competency,
except perhaps in marrying well -- and even when she seemed to be
in charge, he remained in her shadow. The second was that she
couldn't separate herself from the legacy of ashes -- the demise
of American manufacturing jobs, the concentration of wealth for
a global financial elite. Indeed, with her high-paid speeches to
Wall Street, she seemed not just blind but shameless. Her husband
had refashioned the Democratic Party into a personal political
machine, both by promoting personal cronies and by losing control
of Congress (a source of potential rivals), leaving her with a
substantial but very circumscribed fan base.

As for Hillary's campaign, as Lakoff says, the focus was
against Trump:

The Clinton campaign decided that the best way to defeat Trump was
to use his own words against him. So they showed these clips of Trump
saying outrageous things. Now what Trump was doing in those clips was
saying out loud things that upset liberals, and that's exactly what
his followers liked about him. So of course they were showing what
actually was helping Trump with his supporters.

Lakoff doesn't say this, but the lesson I draw was that Clinton's
big failure was in treating Trump as an anomalous, embarrassing
personal foe, rather than recognizing that the real threat of a
Trump administration would be all of the Republicans he would
bring into government. She thought that by underplaying partisan
differences she could detach some suburban "moderates" to break
party ranks, and that would make her margin. Her indifference
to her party (and ultimately to her base) followed the pattern
of her husband and Barack Obama, who both lost Democratic control
of Congress after two years, after which they were re-elected but
could never implement any supposed promises. You can even imagine
that they actually prefer divided power: not only does it provide
a ready excuse for their own inability to deliver on popular (as
opposed to donor-oriented) campaign promises, it makes them look
more heroic staving off the Republican assault (a threat which
Republicans have played to the hilt). When Harry Truman found
himself with a Republican Congress in 1946, he went out and waged
a fierce campaign against the "do-nothing Congress." That's one
thing you never saw Clinton or Obama do.

So, sure, you can nitpick Clinton's framing and phrasing all
over the place. A popular view in my household is that she lost
the election with her "deplorables" comment, but you can pick
out dozens of other self-inflicted nicks. I saw an interview
somewhere where a guy said that "everything she says sounds
like bullshit to me" where Trump "made sense." Maybe she could
have been coached into talking more effectively, but the subtext
here is that the guy distrusts her and (somehow) trusts Trump.
Lakoff is inclined to view Trump as some kind of genius (or at
least idiot savant) for this feat, but my own take is that
Hillary was simply extraordinarily tarnished goods. Democrats
have many problems, but not recognizing that is a big one.

Lakoff has a section on "how Trump's tweets look":

Trump's tweets have at least three functions. The first function is
what I call preemptive framing. Getting framing out there before
reporters can frame it differently. So for example, on the Russian
hacking, he tweeted that the evidence showed that it had no effect
on the election. Which is a lie, it didn't say that at all. But the
idea was to get it out there to 31 million people looking at his
tweets, legitimizing the elections: The Russian hacks didn't mean
anything. He does that a lot, constantly preempting.

The second use of tweets is diversion. When something important
is coming up, like the question of whether he is going to use a
blind trust, the conflicts of interest. So what does he do instead?
He attacks Meryl Streep. And then they talk about Meryl Streep for
a couple of days. That's a diversion.

The third one is that he sends out trial balloons. For example,
the stuff about nuclear weapons, he said we need to pay more
attention to nukes. If there's no big outcry and reaction, then he
can go on and do the rest. These are ways of disrupting the news
cycle, getting the real issues out of the news cycle and turning
it to his advantage.

Trump is very, very smart. Trump for 50 years has learned how
to use people's brains against them. That's what master salesmen do.

The three things may have some validity, but Lakoff lost me at
"very, very smart." Much empirical observation suggests that he's
actually very, very stupid. Indeed, much of the reason so many
people (especially in the media) follow him is that they sense
they're watching a train wreck. But also he gets away with shit
because he's rich and famous and (now) very powerful. But can you
really say tweets work for Trump? As I recall, his campaign shut
down his Twitter feed the week or two before the election, just
enough to cause a suspension in the daily embarrassments Trump
created.

Lakoff goes on to talk about how advertisers use repetition
to drum ideas into brains, giving "Crooked Hillary" as an example.
Still, what made "Crooked Hillary" so effective wasn't how many
times Trump repeated it. The problem was how it dovetailed with
her speeches and foundation, about all the money she and her
husband had raked in from their so-called public service. It may
have been impossible for the Democrats to nominate an unassailable
candidate, but with her they made it awfully easy.

For a more detail exposition of Lakoff's thinking, see his
pre-election
Understanding Trump. There is a fair amount to be learned here,
and some useful advice, but he keeps coming back to his guiding
"strict father" idea, and it's not clear where to go from there.
As someone who grew up under a strict (but not very smart or wise)
father, my instinct is to rebel, but I wouldn't want to generalize
that -- surely there are some fathers worthy of emulation, and I
wouldn't want to condemn such people to rule by the Reagans, Bushes,
and Trumps of this world. The fact is that I consider conservative
family values as desirable, both for individuals and for society.
On the other hand, such family life isn't guaranteed to work out,
nor is it all that common, and I've known lots of people who grew
up just fine without a "strict father." But more importantly, the
desired function of government isn't at all analogous to family.
This distinction seems increasingly lost these days -- indeed,
important concepts like public interest and countervailing power
(indeed, checks and balances) have lost currency -- but that's
in large part because the Democrats have followed the Republicans
in becoming whores of K-Street.

Still, I find what Lakoff and, especially, Luntz do more than
a little disturbing. They're saying that we can't understand a
thing in its own terms, but instead will waver with the choice
of wording. It's easy to understand the attraction of such clever
sophistry for Republicans, because they often have good reason
to cloak their schemes in misleading rhetoric. Any change they
want to make is a "reform." More underhanded schemes get more
camouflage -- the gold standard is still Bush's plan to expedite
the clearcutting of forests on public lands, aka the "Healthy
Forests Initiative." Similarly, efforts they dislike get labels
like Entitlement Programs or Death Taxes or Obamacare. And so much
the better when they get supposedly neutral or even opposition
sources to adopt their terminology, but at the very least they
make you work extra hard to reclaim the language.

Republicans need to do this because so much of their agenda
is contrary to the interests of many or most people. But I doubt
that the answer to this is to come up with your own peculiarly
slanted vocabulary. Better, I think, to debunk when they're
trying to con you, because they're always out to con you. Even
the "strict father" model of hierarchy is a con, originating
in the notion that the social order starts with the king on
top, with its extension to the family just an afterthought.
But they can't very well lead with the king, given that we
fought a foundational war to free ourselves from such tyranny.
Indeed, beyond the dubious case of "strict fathers" it's hard
to find any broad acceptance of social hierarchy in America --
something Democrats should give some thought to.

On the other hand, Democratic (or liberal) euphemisms and
slogans haven't fared all that well either, and to the extent
they obfuscate or distort they undermine our claims to base
our political discourse in the world of fact and logic. Aside
from "pro-choice" I can't think of many examples. (In contrast
to "right-to-life" it actually means something, but I believe
that a more important point is that entering into an extended
responsibility requires a conscious choice -- pregnancy doesn't,
but the free option of an abortion makes parenthood a deliberate
choice. But I also think that deciding to continue or abort a
pregnancy is a personal matter, not something the state should
involve itself in. So there are two reasons beyond the frivolous
air of "choice.")

There is, by the way, a growing body of literature on the low
regard reason is held in regarding political matters. One book I
have on my shelf (but somehow haven't gotten to) is Jonathan
Haidt's The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided by
Politics and Religion (2012); another is Drew Westen's
The Political Brain: The Role of Emotion in Deciding the
Fate of the Nation (2007). These books and similar research
provide hints for politicians to try to scam the system. They
also provide clues for honest citizens trying to foil them.

The big news story this week was Trump's firing of FBI Director
James Comey. This has forced me to revisit two positions I have
tended to hold in these pages. The first is that when people would
warn of some likely coup, I always assumed they meant that some
organization like the US military might step in to relieve Trump
of his power. This, pretty clearly, was not going to happen: (1)
the US military still has some scruples about things like this;
and (2) Trump is giving them everything they want anyway, so what
reason might they have to turn on him? Trump's firing of Comey
isn't a coup, because Trump was already in power. It was a purge,
and not his first one -- he fired all those US Attorneys, and
several other people who dared to question him. But those were
mostly regular political appointees, so to some extent they were
expected. As I understand it, the FBI Director enjoys the job
security of a ten-year term, so Trump broke some new ground in
firing Comey. It seems clear now that Trump will continue to
break new ground in purging the federal government of people he
disagrees with -- to an extent which may not be illegal but is
already beyond anything we have previously experienced.

Second, I tended to disagree with the many people who expected
Trump not to survive his 4-year term. I would express this in odds,
which were always somewhat a bit above zero. I still don't consider
a premature termination of some sort to be likely, but the odds have
jumped up significantly. I don't want to bother with plotting out
various angles here. Just suffice it to say that he's become a much
greater embarrassment in the past week. In particular, I don't see
how he can escape an independent prosecutor at this point. Sure,
he'll try to stall, like he has done with his tax returns, but I
think the Russia investigation will be much harder to dodge. Also,
I think he's dug a deeper hole for himself there. It seems most
likely that Comey would have done to him what he did to Hillary
Clinton: decide not to prosecute, but present a long list of
embarrassments Democrats could turn into talking points (after
all, he's a fair guy, and that would balance off his previous
errors). Hard to say whether an independent prosecutor would do
anything differently. Probably depends on whether he draws some
partisan equivalent of Kenneth Starr.

Esme Cribb: UN Ambassador Defends Comey Firing: Trump Is 'CEO of the
Country': Nikki Haley, adding "He can hire and fire whoever he
wants." Actually, many of his hires must first be approved by the US
Senate. And most government employees are protected by civil service
laws. CEOs often have similar restrictions, but Haley seems to think
they possess enough absolute power for the president to envy, much
as CEOs often envy the power of absolute monarchs and dictators.

The brazen firing of Comey is an escalation. If Trump is allowed to
get away with this and appoint a lackey as chief investigator into
his team's alleged wrongdoing, the world will see the United States
as a failing state, one that is turning its back on the core ideas
on which it was founded -- that no individual is above the law and
that those in the government, at every level including the president,
work for the people.

Meanwhile, President Trump froze most federal hiring, ensuring, for
the experiment's sake, that the executive branch is also short-staffed
at middle and lower levels. Similarly, Trump has asked Congress to slash
the budgets for most civilian agencies, in the hopes that those employees
who remain will be unable to fund any programs. He has moved quickly to
eliminate many of the regulations put into place by previous governments,
leaving private sector actors more free to pollute the environment and
fleece the general public. This week, President Trump announced his
intention to precipitously slash corporate taxes as well, in an apparent
effort to reduce federal revenues and thus further reduce the federal
government's ability to function.

Micah Schwartzman/Mark Joseph Stern: How Trump Will Transform the
Federal Courts: Republicans have been systematically nominating
younger judges, on the theory that they'll stay in power longer,
resulting through natural selection in a disproportionately conservative
bench. Trump's influence will also be furthered by McConnell keeping
open "more than 100 court vacancies" (double the number open when
Obama became president).

Also a few links less directly tied to Trump, though sometimes still
to America's bout of political insanity:

Jessica Bonanno: Progressive Senators Are Going Big for Employee
Ownership of the Businesses They Work At: Specifically, Bernie
Sanders and Kirsten Gillibrand. I'm a big fan of employee-owned
businesses: they promise to harmonize labor-management relations,
and they inherently incentivize workers to contribute as much as
possible. This strikes me as preferable even to unions, which give
workers more power and a fairer share of profits but work mostly
through adversarial conflict. Gar Alperovitz has written much
about this. Thomas Geoghegan has focused more on Germany's
co-determination system, which gives workers board seats but
not actual equity.

Even on the rare occasions when the costs of American war preparations
and war making are actually covered in the media, they never receive
the sort of attention that would be commensurate with their importance.
Last September, for example, the Costs of War Project at Brown University's
Watson Institute released a
paper demonstrating that, since 2001, the U.S. had racked up $4.79
trillion in current and future costs from its wars in Iraq, Afghanistan,
Pakistan, and Syria, as well as in the war at home being waged by the
Department of Homeland Security. . . .

On the dubious theory that more is always better when it comes to
Pentagon spending (even if that means less is worse elsewhere in
America), Trump is requesting a $54 billion increase in military
spending for 2018. No small sum, it's roughly equal to the entire
annual military budget of France, larger than the defense budgets
of the United Kingdom, Germany, and Japan, and only $12 billion less
than the entire Russian military budget of 2015.

Trump currently has a 45.1[*] percent favorability rating, one of the lowest
for any president in the history of polling. But Democrats fare worse.
The DNC has only a 38.8 percent favorability rating.

A January Gallup poll indicated that party identification is at record
lows, with 42 percent identifying as independents, 29 percent as Democrats,
and 26 percent as Republicans. A recent Washington Post poll showed that
the DNC trailed both Trump and the GOP when voters were asked if the party
was "in touch" with their concerns. In fact, only 28 percent of those
polled felt the party was connected with issues that matter to them. . . .

The elephant in the room for the DNC isn't Trump or the GOP or Bernie
bros or Russian hackers; it is its own elitist, corporatist, cronyist,
corrupt system that consistently refuses to listen to the will of the
people it hopes to represent. Thus far, though, DNC leadership has
refused to take these issues seriously. It's a strategy that smacks
of arrogance and hubris. And it's a politics that looks a lot more
like the GOP than a party invested in helping the little guy.

Matt Taibbi: Free Lunch for Everyone: Review of Rutger Bregman's
book, Utopia for Realists, which "argues that money should be
free and a 15-hour work week sounds about right." Taibbi also wrote
The War in the White House, which prematurely cited April 5-7
as "the most crucial [period] in the history of America's last
president, Donald John Trump." Mostly about Steve Bannon, whose
power was curtailed during said period, yet a month later he's
started to look like the sane one. The fact that someone with
the imagination and flair of Taibbi can't write a piece on Trump
that doesn't seem hopelessly dated two weeks hence is possibly
the scariest statement you can make about the president.